Now, let’s talk about how you can optimise your email marketing strategy.

Subject Line

The first goal you have after your email has been delivered is to increase the open rate. This is because you want the actual content to reach your prospects. It is therefore very important to make sure that you have optimised your Subject Line, as that is your first chance to capture your prospects attention and interest. Here are a few tips for you:

Preview the Subject Line across different devices and browsers to see how it will look like in your prospect’s inbox.

Lastly, make sure your Subject Line is relevant to your email’s overall topic. The topic itself might not have been relevant for your send list if the open rate performed poorly.

Personalisation

Creating a Subject Line relevant to the email’s overall topic, leads us to another key element in email marketing, which is optimising your content. The one thing that most experts will tell you is key for your content is Personalisation. We can’t stress this enough. Today’s customers expect personalisation and relevant product offerings. You do no longer need to meet your customers face-to-face in order for them to feel a personal connection to you and your brand.

You could include your customers first name in the beginning of the email and offer them relevant products or services. These feature can all be implemented automatically by using for instance, a Marketing Automation tool. Pardot is a great example of how you can easily use Dynamic content and Variable tags in your emails. For example, you can insert a variable tag that will change dynamically depending on the prospects names on your send list. You may also want to make parts of your copy dynamic, depending on which country your prospects are from or their product interest fields.

Dynamic content will make sure that you are giving the right and relevant email content to each individual prospect. It won’t matter how good and optimised your content is if it’s irrelevant to the prospects who receive it.

Engagement

Don’t forget to also make your emails engaging. Imagine how many emails the prospects may receive. This is why it’s important to stand out. The first thing that comes to our mind might be to include a video. But did you know that not all email service providers are that acceptable of videos embedded in emails? You can in fact instead increase your chances of landing in your prospects spam folder. It would be much better practice to include an image in your email that is linked to where your video is hosted.

Testing

Another key thing could improve your email marketing strategy is testing. In marketing automation you have the choice to run A/B testing on your subject line or the location of your CTAs for example, and see how your email will render for different devices, browsers and email providers. A tool such as Pardot offer you the possibilities to test all of these different elements, in order to help you understand what performs the best for which target group.

Target group

Optimising your email marketing content is of course very important but it’s not everything. You might also want to think about when your targeted list will most likely open and read your email. Depending on who you send out your email to, you might need to consider time zone differences, weekdays or weekends, business or after work hours. The best way to figure out what works best for your prospects is by testing, testing and testing.

Reporting

It seems like you are now ready to schedule your optimised emails. However, don’t forget about the follow-ups and learning from your email marketing campaigns. We highly recommend to regularly review your email reports. Key performance indicators (KPIs) may differ depending on your email campaign and its objectives. Businesses have found these metrics important: Total sent, Bounces, Delivery rate, Unique opens, Unique CTR, Total Opt-Outs and Spam. CTR is especially a metrics that will give you indications on how engaged your prospects were with your email. This metrics also helps you understand what type of content your target group is the most interested in. Being able to track the links in your email is therefore very important.